Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Gender, generation, class, and region stereotypes come together in the Valley Girl figure — SoCal upper-middle-class teenage girl — that we’ve written about several times on Language Log and this blog. Now she’s gotten to Zippy:

As usual, the locale of a Zippy is taken from real life: Shirley May’s Restaurant-Big Boy in Albany (or, if you want to get really local, Crabtree) OR (photo here). Shirley’s breakfasts get good reviews.

I like the conceit of having Zippy address Big Boy as Shirley.

And then there’s the strip’s title, “Square Root Beer”, a phrasal overlap portmanteau.

This entry was posted on August 6, 2010 at 10:44 am and is filed under Language and gender, Language of teenagers, Linguistics in the comics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.